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Leahy previews immigration markup

The study was requested by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a key Senate immigration negotiator who has touted the economic value of comprehensive reform. He had furiously pushed back against a report released earlier this week from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which argues that the Senate immigration bill will cost $6.3 trillion due to new spending on entitlements and social programs.

Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that over a longer term, Social Security benefits will increase, but at the same time, the rise in the U.S. population will have “substantial positive effects.”

“Overall, we anticipate that the net effect of this bill on the long-range [Social Security] actuarial balance will be positive,” Goss said.

The U.S. population – accounting for legalizing undocumented residents and new legal immigrants — would increase by about 5.3 million in 10 years if the bill were enacted, according to the study. Critics of the Senate’s immigration bill, such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), have charged that the figure would be significantly higher and subsequently burden the U.S. economy by pulling down wages and add more workers to a labor force already lacking enough jobs.

Goss’s findings also concluded that the border security measures and employment verification included in the immigration legislation would have a “significant” impact – lowering the number of illegal immigrants entering the country by about 500,000 per year.

Of the estimated 11.5 million immigrants now residing without documentation in the United States, 8 million of them would transition into registered provisional immigrant status, according to the Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration said it is also looking into a longer, 75-year estimate of the impact of immigration legislation.